


Stumbling Along

by Ha_Haha_Hahahaha



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Angst, Gen, Humor, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, and i mean pitch black humor, very komaeda centric to the point where the komahina is fairly minor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-06
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-18 18:41:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14858139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ha_Haha_Hahahaha/pseuds/Ha_Haha_Hahahaha
Summary: The clock that Komaeda's life ticks to may never change, but maybe his spirits can.





	Stumbling Along

**Author's Note:**

> and b4 the fandom gets mad at me for putting another komahina fic in the tag 
> 
> anyway this is sort of stream-of-consciousness komaeda bullshit but i tried to make it as entertaining/heartwarming as possible. thank you for indulging in me.

People would look at Nagito Komaeda as if his shirt had “Sex Offender” written on it in bold black font. Maybe underlined and italicized as well. Granted, this wasn’t actually the case, as Komaeda wasn’t a registered sex offender, or a sex offender at all, but it’s not like that stopped anyone from staring. Perhaps it was the fact that people who look like malnourished rats and wore clothes that might as well have been stolen by a heroine camp full of Nirvana fans weren’t very common in Japan, or anywhere, for that matter. Maybe it was the fact that whenever Komaeda did so much as open his mouth, he’d manage to piss someone off with a remark of his. Or it could have just quite possibly been that everyone in the town had known him at that point, and had come well-acquainted with the fact that all of his friends and family throughout the years had gotten a fate akin to stepping on a landmine. And I’m not even talking metaphorically. Some of them actually did step on a landmine. 

 

And thus, Komaeda was alone, sitting on his couch watching mediocre crime shows while he shoved nothing but potato chips in his mouth, downing them with a can of soda. After he finishing about seven episodes, he got himself some dinner from his kitchen, which also consisted of potato chips and soda. It was truly a wonder how he ended up with cancer and dementia yet not heart disease and some form of diabetes. He probably should have cared a bit more about his diet, but, well, he had cancer and dementia, so he wasn’t really inclined to give a fuck. 

 

He then picked up a book. It was about a man who was too perfect to be true eventually being persecuted for his teachings and then dying selflessly taking the burden of all the world’s wrongdoings. It then came to Komaeda that was reading the Bible. Not really knowing what to do about his intense desire to become Jesus Motherfucking Christ, he went to bed, shivering under the covers. 

* * *

 

The next day, Komaeda went to school.

 

Komaeda looked at his classmates as if they were the sun- no, that would require him to squint because looking at the sun really fucking hurts. A better comparison would be something more unusual, more special than what you’d usually find on Earth, like a liger. Yes, that’s it. They were all ligers and Komaeda was Napoleon Dynamite, though he wouldn’t draw his peers in his notebook or anything, or at least not regularly. 

 

Halfway through class everyone had to get into groups for an assignment. Naturally, Komaeda was the odd-man out, as the class only consisted of 15 people. Yukizome, his teacher whose only real experience was in housekeeping, kindly directed him to join Souda and Kuzuryuu and form of group of three. About ten minutes later Komaeda had gotten a punch to the eye from the former for letting it slip that he didn’t think there was any chance of him getting a date with Sonia. However, Komaeda kept smiling, as he figured being attacked by an actual liger would be much worse. 

 

Later that day, Komaeda saw Souda fall down and his his face on the pavement. For some reason, the blood that surged from his nose almost looked orange. 

 

When he got home, Komaeda took his medicine, taking one pill from each bottle. He heard stories of people who downed a whole bottle of their medication at once and ended up dying. Komaeda thought about what it would be like to down all ten bottles of pills. Suddenly feeling kind of sick to his stomach, Komaeda flopped down on his bed and looked up at the ceiling. He considered what other drugs could possibly kill him, and then he went to sleep without even eating any potato chips. 

* * *

The next day, the first thing Komaeda did was take a shower. He didn’t take one the day before and felt extremely gross about it, so he stripped himself of his clothes and stepped inside. The water that came out of the showerhead was dark red, the true color of blood as opposed to whatever the hell had come out of Souda’s nose. It smelled like blood too, and probably tasted the same as well. Komaeda didn’t go that far to investigate because he wasn’t a vampire. He was quite startled at first, but since it didn’t seem to be staining his hair or his skin, he rolled with it, as he still had soap.

 

As he walked to school, Komaeda noticed two squirrels fornicating on a dead fox full of maggots on the side of the road. One of the squirrels had foam coming out of its mouth and a gigantic sore on one of its hind legs. Komaeda felt somewhat down about the fact that a squirrel with rabies could find love while he couldn’t even find someone who was willing to be his casual acquaintance for a few months. However, the whole sight was enough to make him swear celibacy. 

 

After school, Komaeda stopped at the market to buy more potato chips. He made it halfway down the snacks aisle before noticing that the store was having a fresh produce sale. Going along with it, Komaeda went to pick out a few oranges. Once he took out an orange, the whole vat toppled over onto an eight-year-old with downs syndrome. The child’s mother then started screaming at him. She said, “Someone like you doesn’t deserve the slightest bit of happiness!” 

 

Komaeda grinned back at her and said, “I know.” He was then booted out of the store and banned from coming back there ever again. 

* * *

 

When the weekend finally came, Komaeda decided to spend time with someone named Hinata in the park. Hinata had originally just stopped by his house to drop off some groceries because Komaeda was banned from the market, but because neither of them had anything better to do (Though Hinata probably did), they decided to have as normal of an outing as humanly possible. 

 

Komaeda wasn’t sure whether Hinata liked him. He’d drone endlessly about how all these wars, mass shootings, and starving children in Papua New Guinea had some sort of hope in them, even at the conceptual level, and Hinata would just lie there. He was probably thinking of when he would be able to go home and wash any memories of Komaeda away with Netflix or perhaps a nice girlfriend, or maybe he just had a song stuck in head. Either way, Komaeda definitely preferred silence to getting punched in the face or banned from stores. 

 

Komaeda definitely liked Hinata. Sometimes, he liked to imagine a fantasy world where Hinata would take his hand, pull him into a boat, and the two would sail off to a resort island where no one else could bother them. He also thought about him every time he masurbated, but that’s more of an afterthought. 

 

While they were lying on the grass under the comfortable shade of a tree, Hinata asked him, “So? What about you? Do  _ you _ have hope?” 

 

“Of course not,” Komaeda said with a laugh. He looked up at the clouds and noticed that one in particular had taken the shape of a teddy bear. The cloud then leaped out at him and the next thing Komaeda knew he was back in his house. He had woken up to Hinata holding up a plastic bag full of razor blades with red stains on them, a mortified look on his face.

* * *

 

One interesting fact about Komaeda that he never even knew for himself was that he was technically Nagito Komaeda II. His great-grandfather was also named Nagito, and that man had spent his life dedicating himself to building up a powerful mafia dedicated to protecting the family name and being as awful as possible.

 

He passed on the title of Mafia Chairman to Komaeda’s grandfather, who had inadvertently started a deadly feud with a rival mafia located all the way in Brazil by killing a member he had mistaken for someone who had sex with his girlfriend back in high school. He married a young woman named Tsubomi and had six children with her. He wanted to have more, but two of them ended up dying, so he figured that would be enough. All of his children swore their allegiance to the Komaeda Clan, and he would routinely take them all out for target practice so that they could eventually gun down every last member of whoever was in Brazil. 

 

The eldest child, Ayumi, led a successful life as one of Japan’s most prominent businesswoman before contracting HIV from an infected needle that had been used on her in an assassination attempt. The second child, Hideki, also contracted HIV, but that was because he had failed to use proper protection when going to the illegal brothels he would frequent. The third child, Mina, had become a popular idol, and died on stage due to downing all the babercide in her dressing room directly before the show. The last remaining child, Daichi, is of course Komaeda’s father, and is the only child to have actually stuck with the whole mafia business. 

 

However, he had ended up betraying the family when he had struck up a conversation with a woman from the Brazilian mafia during a mission to kill her. Finding that they enjoyed each other’s company, they got shitfaced at a bar and fucked like rabbits that night. Deciding to become a legitimate item, they killed Komaeda’s grandfather in the fear that they couldn’t stay together otherwise. Komaeda’s grandmother died believing that he had gotten into a really awful fishing accident. Daichi and his wife then inherited a massive fortune, and got married. About a year later, they popped out good ol’ Nagito. About seven or eight years after that, they both died due to the most inconvenient meteor strike in the history of mankind. 

* * *

Komaeda looked into a box under his parent’s old bed containing a bunch of secret items. It had been about a decade already, so he felt less guilty about it. He had found out that they had both dedicated themselves to Satanism and also had a very large collection of pornos. He told Hinata about it, to which he only was offered the suggestion to throw it all out. Komaeda sold the porn to Teruteru for a fairly large amount of money and then spent it on the opportunity to have a really expensive date with Hinata.

 

Hinata was still very new to the whole being into guys thing, but he indulged Komaeda anyway, dressing up in the nicest attire he could find. The evening didn’t pass by too awkwardly until Komaeda suddenly felt very nauseous, in which he made a scene of excusing himself to the bathroom where he threw up in the toilet. His vomit sort of looked like confetti. Hinata rushed in to help hold his hair back, and then offered to walk him home. When they got there, he slowly wrapped his arms around Komaeda’s waist and gently placed his lips to his cheek. His face afterward was that of a constipated tomato. 

 

After saying their goodbyes, Komaeda went to bed and never slept any better.

 

The next day, it was reported that Hinata was in a vegetative state in the hospital. 

 

Komaeda smiled as if he had expected this outcome the entire time.

* * *

 

Yukizome asked Komaeda at school the next week what he wanted to do with his life once he graduated high school and maybe went through college. Komaeda said he wanted to be a stepping stone, not because he had a sexual desire to be stepped on, but because he wanted to be an assistor, much like those literal slabs of rock in the pond were to little kids trying to get across a stream. Even making a metaphor out of it, it still seemed like it would hurt.

 

Yukizome remarked that there’s really no fun in just being a stone. Komaeda wanted to say that anything could be better than his life at the moment, but he wasn’t in the mood for any shallow encouragement she was ready to give him. 

 

Hinata’s twin brother, Izuru, visited him later that day. He didn’t seem to care much about his sibling’s situation. He gave Komaeda some chocolates that were arranged by the entire family, told Komaeda he smelled like rotting flesh, and then fucked off.

 

 

Komaeda sniffed at his shirt and decided he did sort of smell like rotting flesh. He started to think that blood showers might not have been the best idea in the first place. However, he felt too tired to call someone to fix the problem and took another one that night anyway.

* * *

A few days later, Komaeda went to visit his parents’ graves. They weren’t really graves as much as just slabs of stone with their names scribbled on them given their bodies were too mangled by the plane crash to even distinguish the remains from one another. Komaeda held on to the hope that they were watching him from heaven and cheering him on as they did when he was a little boy.

 

The truth was that Komaeda’s parents were spending their retirement days in the clouds pretending that they were living a life in which they didn’t meet their horrible fate, meaning they pretended they didn’t even have a son in the first place. This is arguably because Komaeda’s parents were terrible people, but truth be told, having to watch their son repeatedly hit rock bottom to the point where he even got out a pickaxe was just a little too much to bear for them. 

 

Komaeda tossed a bunch of lilies in front of their headstones. The petals sort of resembled his hair. A medium came up to him and asked whether he’d like to communicate with their spirits, to which he politely declined.

* * *

 

Komaeda went to the hospital to visit Hinata the next weekend. In the waiting room, a man who looked about ninety years old started to talk to him about how his brother had died in the recent war against the United States. Komaeda told him that it was the 21st century and the man looked very confused.

 

The visiting hours were short and quick but at least Hinata looked at peace. A doctor Komaeda recognized walked up to him and started talking to him about whether he had any long-term plans for his behavioral dementia, given patients usually need a caretaker at some point. Komaeda answered that his neighbor might oblige, as they were good friends. Little did the doctor know, Komaeda’s neighbor had bordered his house with tripwire in case Komaeda was to get any thoughts of breaking and entering. It would probably just be easier for Komaeda to jump into traffic before he needed someone to actually look after him.

* * *

 

When the weekend came, Komaeda decided to talk to God. He wasn’t particularly pious, but he did have an interest in different religions, and it was hard for a guy who believed that one’s worth was determined solely by how good they were at anything from leadership to Yahtzee to be all that skeptical.

 

He put his hands together in a praying motion and closed his eyes. For a few minutes, he sat in silence, only hearing the sound of some really ugly birds squawking as his mind contemplated what would be the best way to greet God. Out of nowhere, he heard someone yell out “fuck off” really loudly. Komaeda’s eyes snapped open. He got up from his bed and looked in the window, noticing that no one was there. 

 

Komaeda slept that night like someone who had just been told to by God to fuck off.

* * *

 

The next day, Komaeda went to an overlook of the sea.

 

The sunset was shining over the horizon, lighting up the sky a serene yellow, the waves in the distance gently cascading. A light breeze ruffled Komaeda’s hair. The air smelled of sea salt. If he was in a movie at that moment, it would probably be a very bad rom-com. He would probably be the charismatic yet difficult guy who looked exactly like every other popular male actor, and he’d be holding a girl’s hand, maybe kissing her so that the director could cut to a really awkward sex scene with cheesy 80s music playing over it, like in Top Gun. 

 

However, Komaeda wasn’t thinking about how beautiful the scenery was at that moment, nor the classic Tom Cruise action flick. He was thinking about jumping off that cliff and being impaled by one of the rocks below, maybe even decapitated if his luck decided to kick in. 

 

Komaeda sat down at the very end of the grass and dangled his legs off the edge. He nonchalantly picked up a stray pebble from the grass and threw it, watching it transform into a little speck and begin its plunge into the sea below. The fact that that was a  _ really _ large drop began to dawn on Komaeda, to which he came to feel a little queasy. 

 

He patted the ground for another pebble, only for his fingers to brush off something that felt like glass. Curiously, he picked it up and held it up in front of his face. It looked like a broken fragment, almost like a gem, and it lit up on his hand. Komaeda could almost see little sparks of orange illuminating from it. 

 

He sighed, put the substance back in his pocket, and stood up. The suicide business could wait a little while.

* * *

 

Months passed and Komaeda’s life remained the same. The cycle of good and bad luck operated like a seesaw that never ended, even when the kids on it were nothing but rotting corpses. Hinata managed to recover from his comatose state and get out of the hospital. He still insisted on seeing Komaeda, to which he really couldn’t refuse, but only under the condition that he have a helmet and body armor on at all times when they were together. It made things awkward for sure, but it seemed to be working for the both of them.

 

The shower problem came to a halt as well, but not because he had gotten it repaired so much as the doctor telling him he had been hallucinating given what was conveniently the rarest side effect of one of his ten pills. 

 

He was taking a stroll through the town on a quiet summer evening when an old lady who he had never seen before stopped him. Komaeda didn’t know if she was clinically blind or not, but she must have not been able to see with how tightly her eyes crinkled. She had fairly defined wrinkles around her lips too, making it seem almost like an asshole, but Komaeda wasn’t ready to tell her that. 

 

She asked for quite simple directions, to which Komaeda offered his guidance. She then placed her hand on his and lightly smiled. 

 

“You’re such a young man,” she said, “I wish you a wonderful life.” 

 

Komaeda watched her as she ambled along, the cane in her hand thumping against the sidewalk. Just for a moment, he stopped caring about how the townspeople looked at him like he was child molester, how his classmates would rather have a runin with an actual child molester than befriend him, or that he was banned from at least five stores at this point. The fact that his boyfriend could die at any minute, the fact that  _ he _ could die at any minute, caused no worry in his heart at all. His dream of becoming a stepping stone was unattainable, not to mention his very suppressed desire of becoming the stone-stepper himself. His parents were drinking martinis in heaven’s equivalent of Buenos Aires, long since forgotten about him, and even God of all people had something out for him. But Komaeda didn’t care. Even if he woke up each morning not knowing what to expect, Komaeda felt as if he could live a little more. 


End file.
